Enterprises commonly employ promotional techniques to improve profits, revenues, sales volumes, and the like. Promotion events are actions an enterprise might take to get consumers to buy products. For instance, an enterprise may adjust prices as needed to encourage sales of particular products. Alternatively, or in addition to price adjustments, an enterprise may specially present or advertise its products to increase consumer awareness and demand. Because of the variety of promotion discounts often applied at any one time, the complexity of the market, regional variance in sales, and difficulties in understanding customer response, it is usually very difficult to plan promotion events and pricing adjustments to meet enterprise-specific objectives. Another problem arises with the difficulty of accurately forecasting effectiveness of various promotional tools and price adjustments, and evaluating the influence of each promotional event on the overall enterprise objectives.
Generating promotion plans and predicting the consequences of various pricing and promotion strategies, especially when faced with an astronomical number of products and combinations, is beyond the capabilities of the unaided human mind. A particular problem faced by a user making promotion and pricing decisions includes, for example, the estimated optimal values of prices for selected products may be incompatible with overall enterprise objectives, such as improving revenues, profits, sales volumes, and such. Therefore, such promotion and pricing decisions are unacceptable.
A number of techniques and computerized systems have been developed for optimizing promotion decisions. However, some of these techniques and systems cannot efficiently process the astronomical number of products and combinations to arrive at an optimal promotion plan and forecast demand in response to the promotion plan. Moreover, these techniques cannot adequately account for the variations in product pricing across a variety of stores of an enterprise when determining an optimal promotion plan. Another problem with the prior art is that a user cannot make promotion and pricing decisions based one or more objectives of the enterprise, and vary those promotion and pricing decisions based on a relative weight of realizing those objectives.